The Innocence Project is a non-profit legal organization that is committed to exonerating wrongly convicted people through the use of DNA testing and to reforming the criminal justice system to prevent future injustice. The group cites various studies estimating that in the United States, between 2.3 and 5% of all prisoners are innocent. The Innocence Project was founded in 1992 by Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld.
David Milgaard is a Canadian who was wrongfully convicted for the rape and murder of nursing assistant Gail Miller. He was released and compensated after spending 23 years in prison. He was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba. As of 2015, he lives in Calgary, Alberta and is employed as a community support worker.
A miscarriage of justice, also known as a failure of justice, is when an actually innocent person is found guilty. It is seldom used as a legal defense in criminal and deportation proceedings. The term also applies to errors in the other direction—"errors of impunity", or to any clearly unjust outcome in any civil case. Every "miscarriage of justice" in turn is a "manifest injustice." Most criminal justice systems have some means to overturn or quash a wrongful conviction, but this is often difficult to achieve. In some instances a wrongful conviction is not overturned for several decades, or until after the innocent person has been executed, released from custody, or has died.
South Wales Police is one of the four territorial police forces in Wales. Its headquarters is in Bridgend.
Winston Silcott is a British citizen of Caribbean (Montserrat) parents, who, as one of the "Tottenham Three", was convicted in March 1987 for the murder of PC Keith Blakelock on the night of 6 October 1985 during the Broadwater Farm riot in north London, despite not having been near the scene. All three convictions were quashed on 25 November 1991 after scientific tests suggested the men's confessions had been fabricated.
Darryl Hunt was an African-American man from Winston-Salem, North Carolina, who, in 1984, was wrongfully convicted for the rape and the murder of Deborah Sykes, a young white newspaper copy editor, and sentenced to life in prison. After being convicted in that case, Hunt was tried in 1987 for the 1983 murder of Arthur Wilson, a 57-year-old black man of Winston-Salem. Both convictions overturned on appeal in 1989. Hunt was tried again in the Wilson case in 1990; he was acquitted by an all-white jury. He was tried again on the Sykes charges in 1991; he was convicted.
Steven Allan Avery is an American convicted murderer from Manitowoc County, Wisconsin, who had previously been wrongfully convicted in 1985 of sexual assault and attempted murder. After serving 18 years of a 20-year sentence, he was exonerated by DNA testing and released, only to be convicted of murder two years later.
Wrongful execution is a miscarriage of justice occurring when an innocent person is put to death by capital punishment. Cases of wrongful execution are cited as an argument by opponents of capital punishment, while proponents suggest that the argument of innocence concerns the credibility of the justice system as a whole and does not solely undermine the use of death penalty.
The Exonerated is a made-for-cable television film that dramatizes the true stories of six people who have been wrongfully convicted of murder and other offenses, placed on death row, and later exonerated and freed after serving varying years in prison. It was based on a successful stage play of the same name written by Erik Jensen and Jessica Blank and first aired on the former CourtTV cable television network on January 27, 2005. It is directed by Bob Balaban was produced by Radical Media.
This is a list of notable overturned convictions in the United States.
Mahmood Hussein Mattan was a Somali former merchant seaman who was wrongfully convicted of the murder of Lily Volpert on 6 March 1952. The murder took place in the Docklands area of Cardiff, Wales, and Mattan was mainly convicted on the evidence of a single prosecution witness. Mattan was executed in 1952 and his conviction was quashed 45 years later on 24 February 1998, his case being the first to be referred to the Court of Appeal by the newly formed Criminal Cases Review Commission.
Kathleen Zellner is an American attorney who has worked extensively in wrongful conviction advocacy. Notable clients Zellner has represented include Steven Avery, who was the subject of the 2015 Netflix series Making a Murderer, and the serial killer Larry Eyler.
Karen Price was a 15-year-old Welsh murder victim who disappeared in 1981. After the discovery of her body in 1989, British facial reconstruction artist Richard Neave used her skull to create a model of her physical appearance. The reconstruction and the matching of DNA in the body to that of Price's parents allowed her body to be identified. The case was cited as one of the first instances in which DNA technology was used in this way.
The Dixmoor 5 are five African-American men who, as teenagers in Chicago, Illinois, were falsely convicted of the 1991 rape and murder of 14-year-old Cateresa Matthews. At the time of arrest, the defendants, Robert Taylor, Jonathan Barr, James Harden, Robert Lee Veal and Shainne Sharp were all between the ages of 14 and 16.
Satish C. Sekar is a British author and journalist, and a consultant in forensic evidence. Sekar has specialised since the 1990s in the investigation of miscarriages of justice. His work has been published in newspapers including The Guardian, The Independent and Private Eye, and he has also worked for television documentaries including Panorama and Trial And Error. He has worked on a number of high-profile cases in the UK including the Cardiff Newsagent Three, Gary Mills and Tony Poole, the M25 Three, and Michelle and Lisa Taylor. He also worked on the case of the Merthyr Tydfil Two, presenting scientific findings to South Wales Police regarding the fire that resulted in the police's expert accepting his conclusions that the petrol bought by Hewins that night was not the petrol used in the fatal fire. In 1992, his work helped overturn the convictions of the Cardiff Three and while researching a book about the case, Fitted In: The Cardiff 3 and the Lynette White Inquiry, he uncovered errors in the original evaluation of forensic evidence from the crime scene. His submissions to the Home Office about the DNA evidence were instrumental in reopening the case and the eventual extraction of a DNA profile which led to the arrest and conviction of the real killer, Jeffrey Gafoor, in 2003. The Australian and New Zealand Journal of Criminology said that Sekar's "extraordinary work on the case of the Cardiff 3 [put] academic criminology to shame."
The Illinois Innocence Project, a member of the national Innocence Project network, is a non-profit legal organization that works to exonerate wrongly convicted people and reform the criminal justice system to prevent future injustice.
Part of Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law's Bluhm Legal Clinic, the Center on Wrongful Convictions of Youth is a non-profit legal clinic that represents children who have been convicted of crimes they did not commit. Founded by Northwestern Law Professor Steven Drizin and directed by Professor Laura Nirider, it is the first organization in the world to focus exclusively on wrongfully convicted children. Through its intertwined research, scholarship, teaching, and advocacy, the Center has developed globally recognized expertise in the problem of false confessions, police interrogation practices, and constitutional doctrine governing the interrogation room.
